The course focuses on applications of multiple robots and robotic swarms, e.g., for inspection, exploration, assembly, or surveillance. Compared to a single robot, new challenges arise in all parts of the robotics pipeline: perception and state estimation (of other robots), decision making (collision avoidance and achieving a common goal), and controls (safety or other guarantees). We consider classic seminal and current book chapters and scientific papers that tackle these challenges both from a theoretical and a practical/application perspective.

• Decision Making (e.g., Assignment algorithms, path and motion planning, Dec-POMDPs)
• Controls (e.g., collision avoidance, rigidity and formation control)
• Perception/State Estimation (e.g., relative pose estimation, multi-robot SLAM)
• Applications/field robotics (e.g., environment monitoring, assembly planning, exploration and mapping)

Syllabus